Artwork > Ink Work - Small Portraits

People Series

Commuting long distances every weekday during Covid in NYC, I found myself secreting looks at the scattered commuters around me. I wondered about their facial features hidden behind masks. In my studio I started laying down abstract marks and then examined the textured, patterned space for hints of the human face. Then I extracted faces out of the abstract lines and tones. After some weeks of doing this I began to consider the faces of people I know and reversed the process: starting with the features and working towards abstraction. Eventually these processes overlapped and interconnected so that faces are woven into the patterns and patterns into the faces. Sometimes I am trying to evoke the likeness of a loved one but other times the face is imagined. Sometimes the faces are naturalistic and other times more stylized. Sometimes these elements struggle against each other, other times a dominant aspect overpowers. The process is a tugging between reductive and additive workings and reworkings and a teasing out of representational imagery from abstraction. This allows me to draw on different
aspects of my own identity and allows me to consider those aspects of human beings that are either in harmony, or in contrast to, or at odds, with the world around us.

Small Ink Portraits - 2020-23 and ongoing

I grapple with the duality of my existence, caught in the liminal space between the familiar and the foreign. Through art-making I try to ground myself in a sea of uncertainty and loss. As an immigrant, there’s a haunting nostalgia for a home I can never reach. Brushstrokes and ink marks are a way to send this ache out into the world, a hoping that home will reverberate back to me, tangible, transformed and inviting.
In my role as a mother to mixed-race daughters, I often wrestle with the weight of my own experiences, filled with both pride and trepidation. I’m acutely aware of the myriad ways expatriation shapes identities, both mine and theirs. Teaching immigrant students, I see the flickers of confusion and pain mirrored in their eyes. We share a collective understanding, an unspoken bond formed by the shared scars of displacement. My art traces a personal journey, but its underpinnings are the broader societal issues of racism and inequity, of dominance and control, that define the world. I reflect on the systems of power that loom over us, casting long shadows on our lives and relationships.
In this series of portraits, I channel these experiences — faces from my past and present, like ghosts of connection that linger just out of reach. The stylistic contrasts in my work echo the tensions I experience: the push and pull between abstract chaos and figurative clarity reflecting the known and the unknown, the familiar and the stranger, the friend and the foe. These portraits, ink on paper, vary dramatically in scale, ranging from intimate 10 x 13 inches to commanding 42 x 60 inches. Some faces emerge boldly from the swirling ink marks, while others seem ensnared, struggling to break free from the web of abstraction.
In this tug between clarity and obscurity, I confront my own limitations—my inability to fully articulate the complexities of my identity and the world around me. My art, like my life, is a constant negotiation between longing and belonging, an exploration of how we can find meaning in a world that often feels dislocated and fragmented.